Christoph Schmidberger

What controls you must not necessarily be a person

|

Christoph Schmidberger
What controls you must not necessarily be a person
2005
oil and acrylic on mdf panel 25 7/8 diameter

The scene shifts in What controls you must not necessarily be a person to a bed of long grass. The same young girl, in a similar state of partial undress, leans back as her dog licks a smooth, sugar sweet leg. With her eyes closed and head raised upward, like a saint in religious ecstasy, she is caught in a snapshot moment of dark titillation. In his choice of a setting, evocative of innocence as it is of indiscretion, and a format, the tondo, more customarily associated with Italian Renaissance depictions of the Madonna, Schmidberger positions the painting on a precarious line between the sacred and the profane. His title, a matter-of-fact confirmation of what we dare not think, does the rest.